According to Cisco’s VP of Corporate Business Development, Hilton Romanski, global IP traffic is projected to increase threefold in the next five years. For this reason, the networking giant had its eye on BroadHop, a policy control and service management technology for carrier networks that has been around since 2003. BroadHop is deployed by more than 70 wireline and mobile carriers around the world.

BroadHop has an open policy platform, which is designed to make it easier for service providers to control and monetize any service, regardless of whether the network has new or legacy components. In a nutshell, the technology allows a carrier to develop service tiers based on bandwidth or application.

According to Romanski, the technology will benefit Cisco’s service providers, as users will be incentivized to purchase “customized premium service packages,” such as on-demand streaming.

The BroadHop team will report to Shailesh Shukla, vice president and general manager of Cisco’s software and applications group.

The networking giant acquired three companies last month — most recently, Cariden for $141 million in cash. In an interview with VentureBeat, Cisco’s cloud computing CTO Lew Tucker stressed that the company is always on the look-out for potential acquisition opportunities to bring innovation to its suite of products.